1.  In real life, the winner is the country with the best economy/happiest citizens, not the one who prevents global warming, so that’s how the game must work, too.

2.  Global warming requires cooperation, but per point 1, everyone also has to compete.

3.  Preventing global warming presents a cost, and if it is prevented, the benefit is constant to all players.  Thus, it’s best to be a free-rider on any solution.

4.  Global warming won’t happen for certain.  Even if it does happen, we have no idea when it will occur or what the impact will be.  This means we need a mechanism to randomly decide each turn if global warming occurs, how severe the impact is, and a time limit on the game, so that it maybe doesn’t happen.

5.  There has to be a way for all people to lose.  Otherwise, no one would ever try to prevent global warming; they’ll just try to be the best after it does occur.  This competes against the free-rider problem.

6.  I think this game needs a victory point system.  Victory points can be spent on something that prevents global warming (enviro-chips?).  Every turn, players tell the other players how many enviro-chips they have; however, they don’t need to tell the truth (these are governments releasing figures on pollution).  Victory points can also be spent on things that get more victory points (industry; maybe R&D as well?), but may produce more pollution (or maybe just the fact that you’re not buying enviro-chips is enough “pollution”).

7.  Global warming takes a bunch of VPs (half?) from everyone and makes it harder to get more.

8.  There’s a minimum number of VPs required to win and a limited number of turns (also random?).

9.  If global warming is prevented (determined by counting total enviro-chips at the time of global warming and comparing them to the number required to prevent global warming, which is determined by a severity roll, also at the time of global warming), instead of losing VPs, everyone gets some small number (same to everyone, though)

10.  Trade needs to be a part of the game, which helps you get VPs.  This is so that players can punish someone who is not going along with saving the planet (or the other way around).  Table talk is encouraged, so that people can come up with a plan/convince others to finance more of global warming.

11.  The minimum severity of global warming must be big enough that it’s not realistic for a single player to prevent it (or maybe if it is possible, that player has no chance of winning)

—————–

Well, I know it’s not very organized, but those are a few thoughts I had.  Maybe I’ll actually try to flesh it out a bit more, since I think this sounds like it could actually be a really good game.  Anyone else have any ideas?

After I woke up (late, of course), I decided to check my degree audit online again to see if anything new had been posted, and there it was… I had enough credits! The only piece still missing is the credit for my UAP, but since I personally turned in the UAP grade report and saw the “A” written on it, I feel ok. In 13 days, I will be an MIT Grad. I can finally turn my ring around and move on with my life. I can’t wait.

My project ended up being some work in story-analysis using common sense (provided by ConceptNet, another Media Lab project) as well as trying a new approach to anaphora resolution (basically determining antecedents for pronouns), which didn’t rely so much on common sense.

If you’re really interested, you can download the paper I wrote. I also am planning on releasing the source code to my project by the end of the month, though I want to get through my linear-algebra final first before I clean it up and put it on a webpage somewhere.

Zúotiān, wŏ yŏu yī jiān Zhōngwén zuòyè, kĕshi wŏ de diànnăo bù néng xiĕ hànzi. Suŏyĭ wŏ de zuòyè hĕn nán. Xiànzài, wŏ de diànnăo kĕyi le.

I don’t really know enough Chinese to say what I’m trying to say, unfortunately. Yesterday, I had some Chinese homework to do, and the teachers requested that we type it up. However, my computer wasn’t set up to let me input either pinyin or characters very easily, so I had to look up how to do so before I could do the homework. Luckily, Mac OS X comes with options that let me set up the correct inputs pretty easily (under System Preferences/International, using US Extended for pinyin).

Now, I can type the pinyin spelling of a character, press space, then select from all the characters that match that pinyin and pick the right one. It’s a lot of fun… Hence, this post.

This semester, I’m taking 6.163 – Strobe Lab, and Sunday was the orientation day for photography in general (i.e. lenses, image formation, chemistry, dark room procedure, etc.). I actually felt that I learned a good amount of material. I’ve always had a little bit of an interest in photography (as evidenced by some of my experiments with Flickr this summer), but never much experience. I hope this semester will give me the a chance to take some fun photographs and learn skills that I can use in the future. I could see photography being an entertaining hobby after I graduate.

Tonight, I again had to go to lab (7:30-10:30), but this time it was to perform the first experiment. The basic way that strobe photography works is as follows:

1. the room is darkened
2. the camera shutter is opened
3. some process is started
4. a trigger synchronizes a delay mechanism with the process
5. after the delay, a strobe flashes, which records an image onto the film
6. the shutter is closed
7. the lights are turned back on

In this case, the process we studied was balloon popping. Pretty standard (this is the first lab), but useful for trying different sorts of triggers. We had the most success with an audio trigger for the strobe during this experiment. We set up a microphone to record the sound of the balloon popping, which creates a spike of voltage. Once we recorded that voltage, a delay (~1ms) elapsed before the strobe fired. This timing worked well, because the balloon took about 2ms to pop completely. Hopefully the pictures we took turned out, as well… If they did come out, I’ll see if I can find somewhere to scan them into a computer and post a few online.

As usual, I’ll end this posting by promising to write more later. I have already started two more entries, but it’s getting late, and I should try to get some sleep before class tomorrow at eleven. Goodnight, World!